hi guys, im learning on school c++ and delphi, i love emulators since i discovered what is internet, now i want your help begin make an emulator i wanna know what i have to know and for where begin learn programmin emulator.

Sory my english is really bad :)

I've been interested in writing my own emulators as well. The hardest and most important part ofcourse, is actually emulating the cpu. If you aren't using someone else's cpu core, you have to make your own. This can definitely take awhile, and will require accurate documents.

So the first thing you should do, in my opinion, is download some cpu cores/emulators made by other people. Then open them up and look through them, try to understand it. You also might want to find some emulator's source code to look through. There is no step by step sort of way to do this, atleast not that I've found.

Also, if you decide to go through with this, definitely try to emulate something that is already emulated and well documented. Forinstance, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man. Start easy before working your way into harder and more complex things.

Also, there are a few mildly helpful getting started emulating faqs/tutorials out there. Use google to try to find them. I know there is some "Arcade Emulation Howto" which includes a sort of walkthru for making an emulator of the Phoenix arcade game.

> hi guys, im learning on school c++ and delphi, i love emulators since i
> discovered what is internet, now i want your help begin make an emulator i wanna
> know what i have to know and for where begin learn programmin emulator.
>
> Sory my english is really bad :)
>

> I've been interested in writing my own emulators as well. The hardest and most
> important part ofcourse, is actually emulating the cpu. If you aren't using
> someone else's cpu core, you have to make your own. This can definitely take
> awhile, and will require accurate documents.

I'm just really curious about this. I had heard that too, and in fact, it was tricky, but I wrote a Hu6280 core a long time ago, for a planned TG16/PCE emu, and after I had it sort of minimally working (stepping bootcode in a debugger), I hit a point of "now what???"

It's weird, I had thought that was the hardest part, and yet, I failed (at the time) to be able to see the big picture, and make everything come together as an "emulator", not just a raw CPU core.

Hrmph. Maybe I just don't "get" emulation, somehow. Maybe I don't want to understand it fully, perhaps it would remove the "magic" of it all. I seem to be very good at low-level technical specifics (my background is asm coding, preferably directly to hardware interfaces), but can't seem to grasp the overall picture well enough, or something.

I admit that I'm rambling a bit, it's kind of late here, but.. do you have any suggestions? There have been so few very high-level (aka "theory of emulation") design documents/papers on the subject.

I think my life is just an asymptotic graph, never *quite* able to cross over the "finish line". :|

I think I'm slightly losing my mind too. Hrmm. Sorry for my rambling everyone.

> I think my life is just an asymptotic graph, never *quite* able to cross over
> the "finish line". :|

I feel your pain, dude, I'm into programming since I'm 12 and I've never finished anything beside small crap projects.